On April 1st 1649, a small group of men and women moved onto wasteland at St George’s Hill, near Weybridge, in the parish of Walton-on-Thames in north Surrey, and began to dig over the land and plant vegetables.
These "Diggers", led by radical Christian visionary Gerard Winstanley, could be described as "roughly egalitarian agrarian communists". Protesting the proto-capitalist privatization of common land through the Enclosure Acts, the extortionate rents charged by landlords, and the concept of private land ownership in general, the "True Levellers", as they called themselves, called for "the taking over of waste lands of the manors, by the poor, to be worked collectively, to grow food and raise animals, to feed all, for need, not profit."
Winstanley declared private property the true Original Sin of humanity, and thought it a sin either to rent property or to pay rent for property, both to work for wages and to offer work for wages, and called for the abolishment of labor for hire, believing that the wealthy and powerful would lose their wealth and power if the poor laborers they depended on simply refused to labor:
“This Declares likewise to all Laborers, or such as are called Poor people, that they shall not dare to work for Hire, for any Landlord, or for any that is lifted up above others; for by their labours, they have lifted up Tyrants and Tyranny; and by denying to labor for Hire, they shall pull them down again. He that works for another, either for Wages, or to pay him Rent, works unrighteously, and still lifts up the Curse; but they that are resolved to work and eat together, making the Earth a Common Treasury, doth joyn hands with Christ, to lift up the Creation from Bondage, and restores all things from the Curse.”
The applicability of this to the 21st century economy is left as an exercise to the reader.
The landlords, of course, seeing a threat to both the rents they charged and the labor they extorted from their tenants, beat them, killed them, and burned their huts. Eventually the English government forbade the Diggers to occupy vacant land on pain of death. And so the noble experiment ended.
So it goes.